I-Corps Teams: Customer Discovery Activity for Microelectromechanical Systems based Gas Sensors

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is: it presents a market ready gas sensor system to monitor hazardous and industrial gas leakages such as chlorine and ammonia. Although detection of industrial gases is critical from technical, safety and environmental perspectives, there is a need for a straightforward technology to detect such industrial gas leakages on site. This team's portable gas sensor system will potentially satisfy this need. If successful, the proposed sensor system has potential applications in diverse fields such as: bleaching industries involving food, clothes and papers, agriculture, defense, and others.This I-Corps project focuses on a micro-sized gas sensor system to detect leakage of industrial gases. This sensor system consists of nanoscale metal-oxide layer which will be made using a nanocomposite of graphene and metal oxides. Such composites have attractive properties such as low resistance and high active surface-area, which are important to enhance the performance of gas sensors. Also, this composite layer can be optimized for fast sensor response and enhanced selectivity for a particular gas. The low resistance of a sensor layer will allow designing of low impedance peripheral circuits while high active surface-area will allow fast response and improved selectivity of sensors. The sensors can be designed to reduce power consumption by reducing operation temperatures with integration of micromachined resistive heaters and catalyst layers. The sensor properties can be optimized for different gases at ambient conditions. The ability to integrate signal transfer by wireless technique will also be investigated for this sensor system.